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City of gold

22 minutes

Commodity city

10 minutes

Can apes really ‘talk’ to humans?

8 minutes

Flawed

13 minutes

The Night Watch

8 minutes

‘For one demented summer, it was Mecca’ – the rise and fall of a Yukon gold rush town

Between 1896 and 1899, tens of thousands of mostly amateur prospectors braved treacherous conditions to reach the remote Yukon town of Dawson City, located just under 175 miles from the Arctic Circle. This was the Klondike gold rush, one of the last great gold rushes in North America. This classic documentary from 1957 charts the rapid rise and fall of Dawson City, as recounted by the Canadian author and Dawson native Pierre Berton. And although very few struck it rich from gold, in Berton’s telling, Dawson City still carried with it a spirit of vibrance and hope, if only for a small time. Contrasting photographs of its gold-rush heyday with footage of the much sleepier Dawson City of the 1950s, directors Wolf Koenig and Colin Low juxtapose two very different eras of the unlikely settlement. For modern viewers, its slow pans over still photographs and earnest and immersive storytelling likely bring to mind the work of the US historical documentarian Ken Burns, who credits the film as a major influence. The film won the Palme d’Or for best short at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1957.

Directors: Wolf Koenig, Colin Low

Producer: Tom Daly

Narrator: Pierre Berton

Website: National Film Board of Canada

‘For one demented summer, it was Mecca’ – the rise and fall of a Yukon gold rush town

Between 1896 and 1899, tens of thousands of mostly amateur prospectors braved treacherous conditions to reach the remote Yukon town of Dawson City, located just under 175 miles from the Arctic Circle. This was the Klondike gold rush, one of the last great gold rushes in North America. This classic documentary from 1957 charts the rapid rise and fall of Dawson City, as recounted by the Canadian author and Dawson native Pierre Berton. And although very few struck it rich from gold, in Berton’s telling, Dawson City still carried with it a spirit of vibrance and hope, if only for a small time. Contrasting photographs of its gold-rush heyday with footage of the much sleepier Dawson City of the 1950s, directors Wolf Koenig and Colin Low juxtapose two very different eras of the unlikely settlement. For modern viewers, its slow pans over still photographs and earnest and immersive storytelling likely bring to mind the work of the US historical documentarian Ken Burns, who credits the film as a major influence. The film won the Palme d’Or for best short at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1957.

Directors: Wolf Koenig, Colin Low

Producer: Tom Daly

Narrator: Pierre Berton

Website: National Film Board of Canada

Five miles of fake flowers, cat cushions and muzak: enter the world’s largest market

The Yiwu International Trade City in China is the world’s largest wholesale market for consumer goods, stretching some five miles and featuring roughly 75,000 vendors. The Chinese-American filmmaker Jessica Kingdon’s observational documentary Commodity City employs static shots of everyday scenes from the market – mostly without dialogue – to convey the seemingly endless stretches of vendor booths that specialise in everything from cat pillows to Santa figurines. Through these vignettes, Kingdon captures the incongruous interplay of boredom and commerce, vastness and claustrophobia that characterises this otherworldly space, offering a hypnotic anthropologic exploration of consumer culture and capitalism.

Director: Jessica Kingdon

Producers: Daniel Cooper, Kira Simon-Kennedy

People have been trying to talk with apes for nearly a century. How far have we got?

Since the early 20th century, a number of curious (and sometimes ethically dubious) psychological studies have tried to figure out if we can communicate with great apes using language. In the 1970s, the answer was reported to be an unequivocal ‘yes’ after Koko, a female western lowland gorilla, learned to sign at her handler, a graduate student at Stanford University, using a modified version of American Sign Language. But more recent critiques of the Koko studies (and others) dispute the idea that great apes have had truly meaningful two-way language communication with humans. This video from NPR’s Skunk Bear offers a brief survey of the history of ape-human communication research, suggesting that ‘Can we talk with them?’ might be the wrong question to ask.

Video by Skunk Bear

Producers: Ryan Kellman, Adam Cole

There’s nothing like falling for a plastic surgeon to help you embrace your body as it is

After meeting a potential romantic partner – ‘the nicest guy in the world’– while on vacation, the Canadian filmmaker Andrea Dorfman had a difficult time reconciling everything she liked about him with her judgment of his work as a plastic surgeon. Although most of his work was reconstructive, she couldn’t kick the feeling that the cosmetic surgeries he performed made people feel imperfect, sending the message that some body shapes are better than others. In her charming, vulnerable and heartfelt animated film Flawed, Dorfman sketches out the story of their romance in time-lapse watercolour animations that recreate how the two corresponded with handmade postcards as she confronted insecurities from childhood that challenged her ideas about herself. Flawed was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy Award following its 2010 release.

Director: Andrea Dorfman

Producer: Annette Clark

Website: National Film Board of Canada

How Rembrandt used light and motion to make a mundane commission a masterpiece

The oil painting Militia Company of District II Under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (1642), better-known as The Night Watch, is probably Rembrandt’s most famous work. Its status and critical acclaim, though, have little to do with its subject matter: a civic-guard group tasked with keeping watch on the city walls. In 17th-century Amsterdam, it was highly common for these guilds – mostly well-off men who rarely saw anything resembling conflict – to commission portraits of themselves wearing their uniforms and holding weapons. So why has The Night Watch endured while so many similar portraits have drifted into obscurity? In this video essay, Evan Puschak (also known as the Nerdwriter) examines how Rembrandt’s riveting interplay of light, motion, texture and expression transformed a commonplace commission into a masterwork.

Video by The Nerdwriter

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